NET RESULTS:Californian technology firms are progressive employers and attract lion's share of funds
WHEN IT comes to tweaking profile features, Facebook always seems to be damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.
That’s understandable, of course when you have hundreds of millions of users. People get used to doing things one way, and the changes shift everything about in a fashion that is usually more annoying than (at least initially) welcome. It’s a bit like going to the supermarket and finding they’ve changed the layout in subtle ways so you can’t figure out where half of what you want is.
Add an often non-intuitive interface and it’s no wonder users often create Facebook pages devoted to demanding that the changes be changed back.
Lately the company recently altered the way of viewing any additional pages you’ve set up – such as a fan page, popular with businesses – from your profile: a menu option called “Use Facebook as Page”.
What the heck does that mean in real English? I thought everyone using Facebook was already using Facebook as a page. If you have to go read the help pages just to understand a basic menu option because clicking on the option enlightens one no further, that’s a design and implementation “fail” in most people’s (Face)book.
One change that was easy to understand however, cheered Silicon Valley and San Francisco’s large gay and lesbian community this past week, while I was visiting in the area. The decision by Facebook to add gay unions – civil unions and domestic partnerships – into the relationship status options was widely welcomed.
Valley technology firms have always been leading employers of gays and lesbians (in the dotcom years, a gay friend used to jokingly call the Valley tech sector that employed him “the hairdressing of the 1990s”) and were among the first companies anywhere to offer employee benefits to same-sex partners.
A Facebook spokesman said it had been a highly requested feature by users. Initially, the status option is available in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Australia and Ireland. Users can choose the option of “in a civil partnership” to match Irish legislation.
Meanwhile, Facebook hype continues in the Valley. You’d almost swear there was an editorial edict in the region’s newspapers that, if at all possible, not a day should pass without some mention of the company in some story, somewhere.
While I was visiting, there were stories on investor interest in an eventual Facebook IPO, on the arrival of e-tailers on the site, on the civil union profile changes and even a leading front-page story in the San José Mercury News on all the high-profile Bay Area personalities who choose not to have a Facebook profile.
And all the local papers highlighted the fact that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sat at US president Barack Obama’s right hand (Apple’s Steve Jobs was on his left) at a 90-minute private dinner hosted by eminent Valley venture capitalist John Doerr last week.
A picture of the small clutch of high-profile, high net-worth individuals at the dinner raising a toast with the president was all over the news. One Valley columnist, Mike Cassidy, had carefully parsed the picture and asked whether, despite the Valley having the reputation of inventing casual dress Fridays, it would really have killed some of those tech guys attending to wear a tie.
Jobs, predictably, was in his usual black mock turtleneck – whether he also wore his usual jeans is not discernible – but it’s clear that a lot of the guys in shirt sleeves are tieless.
It’s hard to confirm whether Oracle multi-billionaire Larry Ellison is among the tie-free, but as he usually appears in a mock turtleneck like his pal Jobs, it’s a good guess he was without neckwear.
The sole woman invited on the basis of being something other than the host’s wife or the president’s assistant (the other two women in the picture) was Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, who held up the geek girl’s side in a smart suit.
And what a relief that Zuckerberg chose not to make his sartorial statement with a hoodie. Overall, given that it is usually only the women chief executives who are scrutinised for what they wear, the discussion offered some welcome table turning.
There was some good news as well for the Valley as the new year and economy begins to shift up a gear. The technology sector led a jump in hiring over the course of the last year in the state of California, with 8,300 jobs added in 2010. The majority were in computer and electronics manufacturing as well as the professional and business services sector and the information sector, the latter also heavily infused with technology-related jobs.
US venture capital spend is also on the rise after two years of decline, according to the latest MoneyTree Report, produced by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Last year venture investments rose by 19 per cent to $21.8 billion. One of the most positive signs of a recovery in the sector is a 30 per cent rise in the number of start-ups receiving cash. In the US, some $5 billion in venture capital was spent in the final quarter, with the Valley flexing its muscles – 40 per cent of all US funding went to the region.
It’s an indication that however much wishful and wistful thinking there may be each year about a new wave of technology companies funded out of Europe, the money and the action is still firmly rooted in the nondescript, low-rise, freeway-interlaced suburbs of Silicon Valley.
